Culture. It’s a buzzword often thrown around in business, when looking to attract new employees or clients. But what is culture? And why is it important for small business to get right?
In Australia, we often confuse “culture” with “perks”. Companies make claims about having great culture, but when pressed on what this actually means, the go-to response often involves Friday afternoon drinks, monthly social outings or a football table in the boardroom. While these bring an element of fun to a workplace and provide important opportunities to escape from your desk, how far do they actually go towards business success or retaining great staff?
Successful businesses such as Zappos, Salesforce and Atlassian have all used internal culture as a competitive advantage in their industries, and we’ve learnt from that. We believe culture should be a fundamental part of business strategy. In fact, the our app was built on the internal culture of our original product, Verbate, where we first discovered the value of personalised customer service through sending 1:1 video messages to onboard new customers.
We practise what we preach every day, and it’s working for us – in our first year of business, Bonjoro has seen a 40 per cent month-on-month growth, which has been built exclusively from word of mouth and community advocates.
So, what are the keys to success when developing your small business’s culture?
Make it part of your business strategy from day one
Don’t wait until you have a team of 10-20 people. Truly great cultures are unique, impossible to copy and attractive to the right kind of staff.
Of course, culture changes as a team grows, because functions become more diverse. But if you don’t focus on establishing your culture early on, this change can become a full-scale dilution of everything that got you through the day in the early months of your business.
If you get it right from the start, you can maintain a distinctive culture forever, while still giving your company the chance to mature and diversify.
Lead by example
With a million items on your to-do list, culture can be left to “fend for itself”, treated as secondary to operations, product, revenue generation etc. Over time, this results in a bland workplace and dissatisfied employees.
To get a culture to work, a business’s leadership team should keep it front of mind each day, purposefully putting plans into action to show team members “how it’s done”. This could include exhibiting a positive, optimistic attitude every day; having an open-door policy to discuss challenges and opportunities; openly recognising and rewarding achievements, big or small; or encouraging supportive, constructive internal communication channels.
On a literal level, actions such as taking a lunch break away from your desk, inviting team members to join you to eat, making sure you say hello to everyone in the morning and goodbye when you leave (on time) at the end of the day, will encourage your team to do the same.
A happy team is a productive team, but culture flows down from the top. Treat it with the importance it deserves and include cultural fit as a metric in every decision you make, and you’ll be rewarded with loyalty, enthusiasm and cohesion.
In part two of this series, we’ll explore embracing new team members, evolving your culture as your business grows and the importance of saying “thank you”.
Matt Barnett, Founder and “Papa Bear”, Bonjoro
